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of the power of the worker and peasant which had arisen out of the revolution of October. And then, always haunted, dominated by this legend, this ridiculous fable that the bolsheviks were in the pay of the Germans, I was obviously unable to look for anything else in their acts but tendacious explanations, seated on the top of preconceived ideas, instead of studying events objectively. The „destruction of the army“, the dispersal of the officers' corps was effected, unquestionably, „at the orders of Berlin“ and the „execution of Admiral Schastny was the „punishment inflicted“ by Trotzky upon the diplomatic representations made by Count Mirbach, upon a courageous Russian patriot who, apparently, had, contrary to the instructions of the Government of the Commissars of the People, conducted the fleet from the Baltic—where the Germans were preparing „to take charge of it“, to Kronstadt, amidst ail the ice and amidst considerable technical difficulties.
In this-manner, therefore, to be brief, bolshevism continued in my mind to signify, from the point of view of the war, the, German bribery of Russia, and from the social and European point of view the hearth of anarchy, disorder, mutiny, disorganization, which had to be crushed. I remained incapable, I repeat, of raising my observations even to the slightest suspicion of the formidable work of world social revolution which had just been undertaken so boldly by the Workers and Peasants Government of Russia and which was to develope so logically and so vigourously.
I was still convinced of the necessity of armed intervention against the Germans and the
